HTC Desire S live pictures and hands-on video at #MWC11

Today was the day when HTC chose to announce its new handsets for 2011 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Today is also the day when phone branding has died a bit, since HTC chose to reuse three of its existing names. And add “S” to them. Not “2”, but “S”. How coincidental might that be to Samsung’s own (if you think of it, rather unexplainable) love for the letter “S”? You be the judge.

The third Desire smartphone has surfaced today, as the Desire S joins the Desire and the Desire HD in HTC’s portfolio. Well, joins the latter, since it’s more or less meant to replace the former. The successor to the Desire is, from a hardware standpoint, pretty similar to the phone it replaces. The screen is also 3.7-inch, the camera is the same 5 MP, but some other things have changed, even if not much. The processor is still a single-core 1 GHz affair, but this is the one also found in the Desire HD, and it’s a newer generation than the Snapdragon inside the Desire.

And the main changes here are cosmetic. As you can see, the Desire S has a new design, though not different enough as to render the phone unrecognizable immediately as an HTC product. It’s got a unibody aluminum shell, and it will run Android 2.4 Gingerbread when it hits the streets.